I remember / je me souviens

I remember / je me souviens

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For those limbic bursts of nostalgia, invented by Proust, miniaturized by Nicholson Baker, and freeze-dried by Joe Brainard in his I remember and by Georges Perec in his Je me souviens.

But there are no fractions, the world is an integer
Like us, and like us it can neither stand wholly apart nor disappear.
When one is young it seems like a very strange and safe place,
But now that I have changed it feels merely odd, cold
And full of interest.
--John Ashbery, "A Wave"

Sometimes I sense that to put real confidence in my memory I have to get to the end of all rememberings. That seems to say that I forego remembering. And now that strikes me as an accurate description of what it is to have confidence in one's memory.
--Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason

Saturday, February 25, 2017

I remember a cockroach skittering between my bare foot and the rubber floor pad you stood on by the sink in the kitchen. I was headed for the sink to use something, and expected to find the usual baby roaches that were much slower to dive for cracks and crevices than their parents. I was reconciled to them, but I hated the big roaches, and really hated the one that darted under my instep and away under the sink before I could do anything about it but feel disgust.

I remember that I would squash the baby roaches with paper towels, but that my uptown grandmother, when she was cooking at our house or taking care of my sister and me, had no compunction about killing roaches of any size with her bare hand.

posted by William 9:45 PM
. . . 0 comments

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